1. Field of the Invention
The disclosure relates generally to storage device management systems and methods, and, more particularly to systems and methods that integrate multiple smart cards into a storage device, and manage the storage device locally or remotely.
2. Description of the Related Art
With electronic devices, such as computers or portable devices, being popular, digital data has become a major data recording type for the devices due to increased convenience of digital data. Digital data is always embodied in a data carrier, such as a storage device. The data carrier may vary according to different requirements and applications.
One popular data carrier is a smart card. The smart card is a pocket-sized integrated circuit. The main components of the smart card include a microprocessor and a non-volatile memory, such as an EEPROM. The smart card can receive and process data, and store the processed data in the non-volatile memory of the smart card or output the processed data. The applications for smart cards may be a SIM (Subscriber Identification Module) card for mobile communications, an ATM card for banking, a health insurance card, an electronic wallet, and others.
A card reader must be employed to use the smart card. Generally, the card reader must be connected with a computer via a USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface. When the smart card is coupled to the card reader, the card reader supplies power to the smart card, so that the smart card can perform related operations, such as data input, reception and processing of ID authentication, data security management, and others.
Currently, portable devices, such as mobile phones are widely used. In some situations, the smart card is connected with a portable device, such as a mobile phone. In these cases, the portable device must be equipped with the USB interface. However, it is inconvenient for users to simultaneously carry a portable device and a card reader. Further, due to design and manufacturing limitations and cost considerations, the storage capacity of these types of smart cards is limited. The storage capacity of a smart card is normally below 100 KB. The storage capacity limitation hinders the development of smart card for a wider range of applications.
Therefore, SD (Secure Digital) cards or micro SD cards with high storage capacity, which are widely used by portable devices, are used to emulate the functions of smart cards. In a conventional application, a smart card is packaged into an SD/micro SD card. The microprocessors of the smart card and the SD/micro SD card communicate via the ISO 7816 protocol. For this case, a lot of SDKs (Software Development Kits) must be involved and software of the portable devices must be re-developed to emulate the smart card reader environment. Additionally, since the portable devices may have various OS (Operating System) platforms, software must be developed for each respective OS platform. Thus, making the software development process complicated and time-consuming. Further, the cost for packaging the smart card in the SD/micro SD card is very high. In another conventional application, the microprocessor design of the SD/micro SD controller is directly modified to integrate the functions of controller of SD/micro SD and the microprocessor of smart card. Additionally, the non-volatile memory of the smart card, EEPROM, is replaced by a flash memory. For this case, since the microprocessor is re-designed, the development cost for the SD/micro SD card is substantially increased. Furthermore, the redesigned controller is not adopted for commodity SD/micro SD card and hence the production requires a long lead time. Additionally, since the data output by the SD/micro SD card still subscribes to the ISO 7816 protocol, the software of the portable devices still require re-development to emulate the smart card reader environment.
Additionally, users must simultaneously carry multiple smart cards since no integration mechanism between smart cards is provided. The integration of smart cards is difficult due to the limited capacity of smart cards and independent security mechanisms controlled by different card organizations.